I'm Simon Tucker, I'm Anaplan's Chief Planning Officer. I help our customers to realize and visualize their Connected Planning journey across their enterprise. We begin our story with Anne, who's a CEO of a smart hardware company. They have global manufacturing and sales regions. She has a vision for the new year. In partnership with her leadership team, Anne creates a three-year long-range plan, it's going to target EBITDA and KGAR growth at 20 percent, which is going to ensure that the company's capacity continues to scale, while driving the company's efficiency. Here we see John, who is the CFO of this smart hardware company, and he's trying to figure out the company's AOP, annual operating plan, for the first year. What John starts doing is really collaborating with the rest of his executive leadership team members across all the different business functions. We're going to continue this story, now, and we're actually going to go into each and every one of the different business functions as they collaborate-- breaking down those different silos to get the annual operating plan constructed. We're going to start in Finance. The finance team looks at the critical financial constraints, and then they share all those constraints with each of the functional leaders in the company. Moving on to sales, they actually have to balance their headcount with pipeline, to meet the growth goal of the company-- allocating new quota and territories into their respective regions. Now, at the same time with Sales and Finance, the Supply Chain is having to balance demand and supply for the entire year, and they're going to be looking at scenarios of how they're going to be hiring, versus streamlining, manufacturing-- --looking at efficiency, and how all of the results of those will actually pan out to the overall plan. Meanwhile, in Marketing, the G&A spend targets, and each of their regions are adjusted accordingly, and Marketing are looking at campaigns for trade, promotion planning, for lead management, event management, pipeline management, and so on and so forth. What we're seeing here, really across the business is a balancing act. A balancing act of people, the processes, and obviously technologies. It's where every single business function is breaking down those different silos and working together, collectively, for the overall company goal. Obviously, they're working in their own business functions. Good examples of how they may collaborate is where some people may be able to share headcount or to reallocate headcount from one area of the business to another area of the business. Again, doing that balancing act, across the organization. Now, of course it's go time for John and the team. Those targets have now been broken down into monthly, actionable targets for the rest of the organization across those different business functions. Well, of course, as soon as that plan has been deployed, it's out of date, because what we do know is that business is constantly changing with different conditions outside of the company. Therefore, John has to do an assessment and in fact, John finds out that competition has really heated up, more than he or the team could have anticipated. He needs to assess the impact of that--real time, for now and for the future, tweak those plans in real-time, collaborate with the other business owners again. It's that rebalancing of the plan to make sure that the goals and the targets that the company has promised to their investors, and other interested parties, are actually taken care of and the company will actually meet their targets. What's the beauty of this story? Well, all of it is done in real time on a single cloud-based platform, providing everybody in the company with the right information, at the right time-- --which minimizes the time between business planning and actions to zero. This is Connected Planning, and this is the power of Anaplan
